We're proud to announce that our next patch will actually be an expansion. Don't look so surprised, it's only logical really. If expanding the world of Perpetuum to twice its size is not worthy of this title, then I don't know what is.

Of course calling it an expansion will not make it something you have to pay for, in this context it's free to download like every other patch we have done and will continue to do.

We have the date as well, so to make it all official:

Perpetuum: Terra Incognita will be released on 2011.05.04.

Now that this is done, let's see what's in it for you:

Doubling the game world

The Syndicate Army's heroic offensive resulted in the conquest of 6 new islands. This is a major success, since the area where Perpetuum Agents may operate is practically doubled. As our forces push towards the Nian Empires' hearts, the islands have significantly more infrastructure and the Nians have done some drastic terraforming on them. Three of the new islands will be under tight Syndicate supervision (Alpha zones), but the other three fall beyond its ability to provide policing (Beta zones).

Although they are not explicitly called alpha and beta in the game since they have their unique names, we’ll make it simple for you and tell you that this is their official designation. Keeping this naming convention is beneficial for two reasons: we plan to have many more islands, and the greek alphabet is not infinite. Also we felt like the association of alpha=carebears and beta=here be dragons burned into everyone’s minds, so we didn’t want to mess with that, and this way we can easily assign for example “gamma” to different map types in the future, like terraformable ones.

The new islands will of course include all the features as the current ones, like harvestable plants, mineral fields, artifacts, and so on. NPCs will be higher in ranks, you will be able to fight heavy mechs on the new Alpha islands, and the weakest NPCs you'll find on Beta ones will be rank 4.

Contrary to our previous statement, a few missions will be also available from the start, but more will come shortly after.

We'll also have a little event when the new zones open up:

When the teleports are operational, Agents will be allowed to enter the new zones. Beware though, they might be crawling with special enemy guards, especially around the main terminals and outposts. Take extreme caution and move in large forces to be ready to take out these hostile groups. Once they are destroyed, our jammers will go online and you will be able to safely reside around those terminals from then on.

Highways

One of the greatest scientific discoveries of the new territories is a kind of energized highway network, called ElectroMagnetic ACcelerator Strips (EMACS). These help robots traverse at faster speeds - an additional 36 km/h to be precise - while using these paths. These highways link some of the most visited structures, and the Syndicate will use this newly found technology to build these strips on the old islands as well.

Event notification system

NIC gets transferred, Agents come and go, production gets finished, someone buys your ammo on the market - a lot of stuff can happen in the background, which you were not necessarily aware so far. The new event notification system will help with this, by showing you informative but non-intrusive popups for many types of events. As you can see on the screenshot, you will be able to select which events you wish to get notified of, and even set how long they should be visible.

The system brings some new features along with it, for example you will now know immediately when another corporation changes their relation towards your corporation.

Explosion damage

Destroyed robots will deal area-of-effect damage to their environment within a certain radius. This includes other players, NPCs, and even plantlife. The explosion will have a relatively small "full effect" radius, and a falloff radius as well, and both damage and falloff depend on the size of the robot. Damage will also be modified by the exploding robot’s accumulator status: the peak recharge rate is at 50%, thus the higher the reactor’s performance, the higher the damage will be. Similarly to missiles, robot explosions will have an explosion radius parameter which ties into hit surface size, so smaller robots can practically "dodge" the explosions of larger robots (or at least reduce the received damage). To avoid griefing, this feature will only work on beta (PvP) islands.

New modules

We'll be intruducing two completely new modules in this patch. The first one is the Energy Recovery Plating (ERP), and as the name suggests, this is an armor plating which will absorb a portion of the received damage and transform it into energy, directly injecting it into the robot's accumulator.

The second one is the Weapon stabilizer, which will reduce the hit dispersion and explosion size of your equipped weapons, raising their effective firepower.

Both modules go into leg slots, and will be available via kernel research.

Internal corporation markets

A player requested feature, this will allow you to put up items and adverts on the market that only the members of your corporation will be able to see and use (this will not work in NPC corporations of course). Corporations that didn't take the communist way of life can use it to supply cheap ammo for their soldiers, put up buy orders for raw materials to automatically pay their miners, or any other purposes we can't think of but surely you can.

Mineral and mining changes

I'll start with the good news, so maybe we can sell this off as a good thing™: we'll increase the mining yield of one cycle for every raw material by 50%. And we'll reduce mineral regeneration rates accordingly. Sounds bad at first, but this only hurts those grinding at the same mineral field every day, while the rest of the island is like an untouched mining paradise.

We'll also remove titan ore from beta islands. There's been many discussions about how all the beta corporations are too self-sufficient, which hurts the economy, and alpha corporations don't really have anything they could offer for them. Hopefully this change will start some goods exchange between alpha and beta islands. It's important to note that we will only stop the regeneration of titan ore, so current minerals will stay in the ground until they are all fully mined out.

New player love

I’m sure we agree that joining a player-run corporation takes gameplay to a whole new level. With Corporation recruitment panels we’d like to make it much easier for our players to find a suitable corporation they can join. Corporation leaders will be able to set up a profile based on simple selections including primary activity, location, time zone, what kind of players they are looking for, are they combat or industry oriented, and so on. Based on this, other players can do an advanced search and find the perfect corporation for their playstyle.

We’ll also extend our ingame help with a career tips section, sort of “what the hell am I supposed to do in this game”-guide. You select an occupation from a list, and we’ll show you a collection of useful snippets for that particular topic, filled with links to our current extensive help pages.

The character creation process will also get some much needed guides about what effects and consequences your choices will have there.

Account reset revamp

Resetting accounts has been a bit complicated so far, since if you wanted to do a reset but didn't have enough EP to delete your characters, you had to wait up to 6 days for practically nothing. Players suggested that we should allow negative EP, so we did just that. This way you don't have to wait for EP to accumulate and can immediately do a reset if you wish.

Furthermore we are dropping the 45-day limit for the reset, and you can do a reset as many times as you want. This alone would of course pretty much destroy the persistence of the game, so it comes with a price: the first reset on every account is for free, without a time limit, but every consequent reset will put 20% of your actual total accumulated EP into a cumulative penalty pool. This effectively means that the older your account, the higher the actual penalty will be. Since this is a new system with different rules, we decided to give everyone one last chance to fully utilize it, so those who already had a reset will start with no penalties as well.

We'll be adding an information popup for the character selection screen where you will be able to check how many resets you have done so far, and how much EP you'll get back if you decide to do one.

Of course these won't be the only changes in the patch, you can expect the usual small fixes and improvements as well.

But but... where are my geoscanner folders and assignment system changes? - you might ask. They are coming of course, but we had to draw a line somewhere, otherwise you'd be looking at no patch till summer. So we'll bring those in some 1.1 patch shortly after this one is out (and we have fixed all the new bugs that we're no doubt putting in).

What more to say, we hope you're as excited about all this as we are, and hope to see you taking the new land for yourselves next Wednesday!

3 Campana

Really looking forward to the new islands. The EMAC highways sound great.

With the mineral changes I feel you missed the point...you shouldn't be trying to set up trade between alpha and beta, but between different beta regions of the game, so that one region has more HDT and another more liquizit or something.

6 Kroth

7 Balfizar

"The second one is the Weapon stabilizer, which will reduce the hit dispersion and explosion size of your equipped weapons, raising their effective firepower." Well I guess there will be no point in useing my light bots anymore and mechs with good precision can already chew them up good now with this mod it will be pointless to run one....way to go

22 Winnetou

23 Legedric Warstrike

24 Jita

Well I would like to say that I was gone tbh, not resubbing with no intention of playing but this expansion has given me the will to carry on. This is exactly what these expansions are supposed to do really - provide the players with shiny and fixes that keep resubbing. I really like the methodology behind this bringing of new stuff at once and hope it continues. I would suggest that pre releasing the name and some info about it perhaps a month before release would help.

25 Vosyen Makarovich

Cautiously optimistic, new islands sound very good and other changes look promising. Now it's just the waiting :P

PS: Please be pessimistic in your patchday downtime estimate. We've seen it that if you say (for a major patch) 3 hours, it's actually twice that atleast. I'm pretty sure that ppl won't complain if you say this will take 8 hours and you get the server open in 7 :)

26 Crepitus

new modules - unnecessary and OP. welcome to green shield tanks being invincible with even more accu, etc, and light/ewar/assault getting raped even more easily by mechs.

internal markets - meh, i doubt people use this since presumably it still takes sell/buy orders which means EP/NIC per order vs none but a little rent for doing it with folders.

mineral changes - game breakingly bad. welcome to Beta miners pouring in to strip mine all of Alpha and going home. This will hurt newbies/small corps/soloists *badly*.

new player love - meh, they really need a hell of a lot more than an easier way to join a corp and to have the youtube/forum guides in game, but not a bad idea.

account reset without timers - mixed feelings. getting another free reset is nice but no one will ever sacrifice 20% EP gains for another one unless they reset on day 3 and reset again on like day 7 .. even then they're gimping themselves long term by not being able to feasibly do it again ever. i consider this an acceptable short term solution but something that should be revisited soon. i'd rather see relation gains unnerfed.

28 Ral

Someone (like myself) who is a dedicated miner now has far less advantage over someone who is just hopping into a Termis or Argano for a bit; we will both be able to mine out a field quickly, and it will be location and protection of mining fields that determines effectiveness, not mining extensions and modules.

We'll have to see how it goes of course, but it seems to me that mining will necessarily be a secondary profession, and someone choosing to make it their primary function (me) will be taking advantage of the free reset...

30 Smokeyii

I'm not seeing much "good" in the mining changes to be honest. Maybe I'm wrong and it'll be something I can get into but it sounds like you'll just get more from small fields, which isnt bad I guess, but you'll end up spending alot more time doing logistics and running around looking for ore, and driving half way across the island to find another spot. Well, at least if you're on a highway you can do that 36 kph faster.

I have a question on the ERPs... Do they only work when damage is recieved to the armor? I don't guess sheilds really take damage, they absorb it, but just wanted to clarify that a little. I like this idea, hope it isnt too overpowered, but deffiantly gives me fitting ideas :)

I'm with balf in that they just nerfed the crap out of light robot small gang pvp. Bet it'll make some people happy it's now Mechs Online though :P

Account reset sounds like a pretty cool idea my EA miner account can finally get rid of all the production skills I don't use anymore.

Pvp will get funny now on Teamspeak with people yelling "Get away from so-and-so! He's gonna explode!" lol. More tactics! ( 4 expander sequer baits?!) Should be fun stuff with that.

I think removing titan from beta in conjunction with the mineral changes might not be a bad idea. You've changed the workload around a little bit.. shifted amounts of time needed to logistics - which to me is even less fun then mining.

Overall I've got a good feeling about the purposed changes. Thank you Devs for all your hard work. I'll reward you by reupping my sub :)

34 Freidal Shoveler

For my personal gameplay i'm fine, the new free reset means i can turn at least 2 of my accounts from mining to something else, 'cause i still think the minig/harvesting path always gets the short stick

for the comunity(always imo):
- highways r cool
- explosions are nice
- direction mining has taken since jan/feb is bad
- new islands r great, thou a bit late (2-3 months late?)
- internal market is ...well is something, still i'd prefer some sort of contract like that other game.

all in all , still a huge change/patch/expansion so grats again DEVs

35 Freidal Shoveler

36 Jita

what the mineral changes do is half the amount of time it takes to mine anything - effectively driving down prices of everything further - as well as make offensive mining more of a possibility. If anyone can think of a reason why you wouldn't automatically strip mine titanium from the game i'd like to here it. Mineral mining amounts do need changing but after all thats happened I still think the nerf to recycling was unnecessary. It provided a much needed counterbalance to prevent the type of aggressive strip mining of alpha thats going to happen thereby locking out the newbies who cannot compete with that and even the smaller corps.

37 Smokeyii

As far as I understand from what I read, minerals will still have the same amount of cycles per tile as they do now, but will provide 50% more (It's really more like 1/3rd more after your skills are added on). You'll get more from the fields that you are mining now, but that field will take longer (wonder how much longer...) to regenerate. So they've shifted the workload from time spent mining to time spent transporting materials, and finding materials. Of course the latter part is just speculation... maybe the time spent doing the other will not be any significant increase.

38 Siddy

impying you will go after weird mining locations, jita. I rarely see you do anything but mine the same old locations oooover and ooover again. How abaut you up the shut f*** and let the things roll on its weight?

39 DEV Zoom

"The first reset on every account is for free, without a time limit, but every consequent reset will put 20% of your actual total accumulated EP into a cumulative penalty pool. This effectively means that the older your account, the higher the actual penalty will be."

40 Arga

We like to speculate, but Siddy is right about letting this expansion come out and see how some of the new features are implemented, and what the acutal impact is.

That said, the idea that titan ore, the most abundand of ores in the game, will simply be mined out now because it is only available on 6 alpha islands is fatalistic. Beta corps will mine fields around outposts closest to thier teleporters while alpha corps will be free to exploit fields close to the refining outposts, or anywhere else.

Or beta corps can simply refine Espitium or Brochite and sell or trade for titanium which is easier to transport than the raw ore. This and futher changes will make jump start the commodities markets.